Plague Animals

In this long-awaited second collection, award-winning poet Rebecca Edwards distills the experience of physical and mental trauma; the breakdown of her relationship with her eldest daughter and the attrition of mental illness. Each poem is an act of salvage, commemorating and celebrating the small, the overlooked, the voiceless and unloved. An artist throws his pots into the Brisbane River. Four dementia patients plot their escape from a nursing home. A woman mourns the end of a relationship at its conception. A man sees an ultrasound of his daughter and falls in love. Pain is forced to sing. The reader is asked to look again, to look closely, to see differently those things in themselves and others which convention frames as ugly or shameful, or insignificant.

Subversive, quietly political, intellectually tough, exquisitely observed, the poems question what it is to be Australian, to be an outsider, to be human, to be uneasy in the world.

‘Rebecca is a woman who works with lines…material lines on the paper, in the fabric, wire, plastic and leather of her artworks. What impresses and affects me is the way in which she uses those physical, material lines to connect me to other lines of heart and thought and experience.’ - Dr Gina Mercer